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Quackery is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, you’re obviously far cleverer than I am, so I’m out.

kerravon wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 8:48 amThis is a logical fallacy of appeal to authority, and in general, "credentialism".

I cannot become an expert in every subject, and I cannot evaluate your claims without expert knowledge. If I also cannot trust anyone else to be an expert, how am I supposed to evaluate your claims?

kerravon wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 8:48 amYour credentialism is drugging children with a bogus ODD diagnosis and sees nothing wrong with it. It's part of the canon. I'm shocked that that doesn't give you pause for thought and that you'd continue deferring to such charlatans.

Believe it or not, a lot of people see problems with it. The Wikipedia article on ODD has an entire section for criticism of the validity of the diagnosis, and another entire section on how ODD cannot be effectively treated by medication alone. But extending these disputes to the entire practice of psychiatry is a logical fallacy. (And if the reason you're so upset about children being diagnosed with ODD and given medication is your own personal experience, that too is a logical fallacy.)

Octocontrabass wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 11:57 am

kerravon wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 8:48 amThis is a logical fallacy of appeal to authority, and in general, "credentialism".

I cannot become an expert in every subject, and I cannot evaluate your claims without expert knowledge. If I also cannot trust anyone else to be an expert, how am I supposed to evaluate your claims?

An excellent question.

First - it is reasonable to default to assuming expert consensus as a starting point. The trouble is treating that as the final word.

But the heart of the problem is your own self-doubt. You think you don't have the required skills to evaluate claims - when you do. You simply use the same skills you have as an osdever - you use logic, look at the evidence, and look for internal consistency.

I note that you have successfully pushed back against ODD yourself - without needing a psychology degree.

kerravon wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 6:05 pmBut the heart of the problem is your own self-doubt. You think you don't have the required skills to evaluate claims - when you do. You simply use the same skills you have as an osdever - you use logic, look at the evidence, and look for internal consistency.

It takes years of study to become an OS developer no matter how skilled you are at logical reasoning. The same is true of every subject, and I simply do not have enough free time for that.

kerravon wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 6:05 pmI note that you have successfully pushed back against ODD yourself - without needing a psychology degree.

You mean the qualified experts used as references for the Wikipedia article successfully pushed back. All I did was summarize a Wikipedia article.

Octocontrabass wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 7:39 pm

kerravon wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2026 6:05 pmBut the heart of the problem is your own self-doubt. You think you don't have the required skills to evaluate claims - when you do. You simply use the same skills you have as an osdever - you use logic, look at the evidence, and look for internal consistency.

It takes years of study to become an OS developer no matter how skilled you are at logical reasoning. The same is true of every subject, and I simply do not have enough free time for that.

Alica Okano was 18 years old when she fleshed out fat.c in the PDOS source code. I had been sitting on it for years, with only FAT-16 working for write. As far as I know she hadn't spent "years" studying to become an OS developer. I had been doing it for years though. But it was me who just stepped back and watched in awe. I didn't ask her for her credentials. I just said "thanks".

However, it occurs to me that debating whether I have the "right" to discuss how to fix the human mind is one step down the line. The first is simply assessing the state of the world. I have a different document for that:

https://mutazilah.org/corpus/corrupt.txt

Basically our default state is a chimpanzee troop. It isn't pretty. We have a lot of cultural overrides in place though. Very impressive. But the globe doesn't have 100% cultural overrides.

Which scientific discipline do you think is responsible for assessing what percentage of the globe is still chimpanzee mode? Anthropology? Political science? Psychology? Something else?

It is my opinion that osdevers have the extreme technical skills required to take on a project like this. The problem is that they don't have the self-confidence to do so. It's something similar to the bystander effect. They assume that there is some super-smart person out there - far smarter than themselves - capable of - and actually doing - the required analysis. When that's not the case. What's out there is chimpanzees.